By: Arushi Aggarwal, 4th Sem, 2nd Shift

Most people these days generally think that hackers are those who break into computer systems and websites to misuse the information. And this is a very common misconception, because hackers are not that sort of people. They are in fact the most talented programmers. So instead of using hacker, the term 'CRACKER' should be used.

There is a very thin line that separates crackers and hackers. They are like the two sides of a coin.

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The HACKERS also known as 'WHITE HAT HACKERS' are people interested in working of any computer systems. They are basically programmers as they write code in one or more languages such as C++, Java, etc. They are cyber security professionals who are hired by companies, organizations, cyber crime departments, etc to protect confidential records and they are paid for it. They are legal hackers. They improve the security by proactively attacking a network as a cracker would do. And then they take steps to secure and improve that network. This technique is also known as ethical hacking technique. They use their techniques and expertise to help common people whose bank accounts were hacked, photos were leaked, etc. They share freely what they have discovered and never intentionally damage the data.

Whereas, CRACKERS also known as 'BLACK HAT HACKERS' are illegal hackers. They have extensive knowledge as hackers but they misuse it for personal gains, vandalism, etc. They violate the system integrity of machines with malicious intent. Since they have unauthorized access, they can simply destroy vital information, steal data and use it in wrong ways causing problems for their targets. They are basically criminals. Since crackers know they are breaking laws and can be caught, they cover their tracks. Some hackers rely on automated programs which can be downloaded from websites.

So to wrap it up in a sentence "hackers are builders and crackers are destructors".

Some of the famous crackers are: Albert Gonzalez, who is accused of information and credit card theft; Robert Tappan Morris, who released the first worm, crippling 6000 computers; Kevin Mitnick, who was the most wanted criminal in US as he broke into DEC's computer network and breached national defense warning system and stealing corporate secrets;  Adrian Lamo, who broke into multiple high profile networks like Yahoo! , Microsoft, etc; Jonathan James, who at the age of 15 hacked into NASA, Bell South, US Department of Defense, etc.

Some of the famous hackers are: Tsutomu Shimoura, who helped FBI in tracking down Kevin Mitnick; Dr Charlie Miller, who demonstrated exploits of Apple products by hacking iPhone, Mac Book in 2 minutes; Sherri Sparks, who hacked into networks of Military Services and then used his skills to build strong Firewalls; Kevin Mitnick, who turned from black hat to white hat hacker and is now writer of books and leader of Mitnick Securities, etc.

People can become hackers by doing Ethical Hacking courses and giving exams.

Therefore, we can say that, “With great power comes great responsibility. With it comes a choice to put your skills, talents to good for betterment of people. Or for your own sick pleasures."

By: Varun Arora, BCA 6th Sem, 2nd Shift

Over the past few years, there has been a huge advancement in technology. Many inventions have been made over the last decade. Everyday, we are able to see some new change in technology and the mindset of the people. As more and more people are moving towards the digital society, so its pros and cons are coming every day with some new technique. As we know that a coin has 2 faces; when we talk about its pros, we also talk about its cons. One of them is the hacking which is spreading rapidly these days. Another term associated with hacking is cracking. Both the terms are used interchangeably sometimes. Hacking has affected a lot in the digital world. Its impact has made digital technology to change itself or has asked some difficult questions related to the security in the digital world.

Hacking is generally done for the purpose of making theft or breach in the security without authorized access with malicious intent whereas cracking is entering the network without authorised access or change in some source code so that it makes difficult for the regular operation to be done. Both of these terms have more or less an equal impact on the digital world. In the faster-growing countries like India, this has become a serious issue for the security for digital usage. There are different techniques used in hacking, like one of them is Dictionary Attack- in this type of attack in hackers try to get the password right by typing it many times as if he/she is lucky enough. In this, there is a file which works as a dictionary. Brute Force- It can be termed as a higher version of the dictionary attack. In this, the software that is used will try every possible combination to determine the password until the password is found. Phishing-It is done by making a fake call, fake emails, fake apps, etc. It simply asks you to tell your ID and password and when you enter them, they are transferred to hacker’s server.

As I had said earlier in the article, everything has 2 faces. So hacking is not only used for malicious purpose but somewhere it is used for good purposes also. The fact is it has been 5 years since Facebook pays Indian hackers for cracking bugs. Recently some Twitter accounts were hacked and abusive comments were passed. To remove such things security is provided in many ways. Say for making monetary transactions there are payment gateways. For entering pages and websites you have authentication and authorization techniques. Apart from these things, there are cyber security cells being setup for solving cases of digital problems. At last, whatever we provide for security, everyday new invention takes place and frankly speaking there is no lock that a human can’t break because the lock itself is created by the human only. So this proves that for unlike for every problem there is a solution there is break out for every lock. I want to conclude by saying that:

“Similarities b/w human and computer are more numerous than the differences.”

By: Vipul Jain, BCA 6th Sem, 2nd Shift

In the current time of digital India, some people are trying to do some illegal activities like stealing others’ passwords, access their accounts without owner knowledge etc. They generally use some techniques like hacking and cracking.

Hacking and Cracking look similar and some people confuse these two because of their working. But actually, they both are totally different in their functionality. Mostly both are used for illegal purpose but sometimes they are used for legal purpose especially hacking like hacking any website for government purpose. So the question is what is hacking and what is cracking.

Hacking

Hacking is stealing personal or private data without owner’s knowledge or consent. Hacking usually involves web related hacking like MySQL interceptions, phishing, brute force, etc.

PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Ajax etc. are some of the languages used for hacking.

Cracking

Cracking means to edit the code or create a new code. It generally means to crack any password using software and coding or to modify any software by adding or removing features. Some tools used for cracking are keygen (a key generator), patch or loader. Python, .NET, Visual Basic, C, C++ are some of the languages used in cracking.

But cracking is less harmful as compare to hacking.

Why People Do Hacking and Cracking?

There are many reasons because of which hackers and crackers do this. Some of them are below:

Hacking is done to find out everything about an organisation’s network topologies and bugs/ errors from the office computers through which he can break in.

Cracking is generally done for the profit, maliciously for some altruistic purpose or cause or because of a challenge is there.

According to a research, hackers and crackers spend 80% of their time studying about the victim and 20% of time spend is used to do their work.

Some examples of hacking and cracking are password hacking, website hacking, ethical hacking, etc. There are mainly 3 popular types of hackers:

1. Black hat hacker
2. White hat hacker
3. Grey hat hacker

In most of the developing countries like India, hacking and cracking are growing very fast which is not good for any country whether it is a developing country or developed country. Now if we talk about India, in the Digital India campaign, hacking and cracking are two of the major obstacles which are not good for our country and because of these, India might suffer in future in fields like the rate of growth of our country, etc.

So there is a need to take some action against it like making new rules & regulation and implement those rules & regulations to help the people of India because if no action is taken by our government soon then because of hacking and cracking many people might lose their earning as some hackers and crackers may hack their accounts and withdraw their money from bank which is not good for account holder and for digital India campaign as well. And we also need to create new technologies to prevent hacking and cracking because if we don’t have new technologies to prevent us then hackers and crackers can easily hack our accounts and do illegal work from ur accounts as well.

By: Mohit Gupta, BCA 2nd Sem, 2nd Shift

Hacking is a word by which we think something bad is happening. Is it true? Yes, it is true but not completely true because all hackers are not same. Some hackers are good hackers and some are bad. There are different types of hackers. First ones are white hat hackers. They are generally known as good hackers. The second ones are black hat hackers. They are generally known as bad hackers. Lastly, there are those hackers who lie between white and black hat hackers, they are known as grey hat hackers. Let’s discuss them. Black hat hackers are those hackers who will do damage to others for their own benefits. For example, hacking of servers, hack and leaking the other’s data, blackmailing, etc. Black hat hackers get into the system without any permission to do some damage for their own benefits. Now, talking about the white hat hackers, white hat hackers are those hackers who will take permission to check whether the system is strong or powerful enough to secure itself from other hackers and they also check the system is crackable or not. White hat hackers are also known as ethical hackers because they take permission to check and secure the system.

 Big company’s like Apple, Google, Facebook pay 1000s of dollar as a reward if anyone highlighting the problem in the system and they will say to the company that there is the problem in code or there is a loophole, then the company give reward for this and they can also give job as a white-hat hacker for the security of the system. Now talking about grey hat hackers, they don’t have the wrong intention of damaging the system or for making money, but they don’t take permission and they will hack the system just for fun with their own skills. They don’t have the wrong intention and they also don’t take permission. So, they are neither called black hat hackers nor called white hat hackers. They are known as grey hat hackers. Ethical hacking is a very good field for future, even from previous years, there is a large scope in this. If you belong to this field, you will be an ethical hacker, you have to do some courses and if your skills are good, then you can go for the job in a good company and also make money by doing ethical hacking. Ethical hacking is properly a legal process because you take permission before hacking it and black or grey hat hackers are properly illegal. So, this is all about hacking.

By: Harshit Bansal, BCA 4th Sem, 2nd Shift

One question, can you count the numbers between 0&1? the answer is NO because there exist infinite numbers. This is the deep thinking behind every hacker’s mind.

“FINDING THE LOOPHOLE”, when you stop being or acting as a hacker you will find the magic tricks you believe you can perform. Hacking is generally known by gaining unauthentic access into the foreign vulnerable system with or without permission and the key behind this is finding the loophole. Maybe you will be shocked after reading this, the first hack ever tried was not on a mechanical system! Yes, this is true. A guy named Kevin Mitnick collected the unused bus tickets by dump yard and using those tickets and by just sniffing what serial is used when he could travel all day long to years without paying a single penny. Hacking is gaining expertise knowledge about anything. Technically, it is creative manipulation of code, distinguished amorphously from programming by focusing on the manipulation of already written code. It is done through gathering information about the target machine as the first step also known as Footprinting and scanning. Metaphorically, it extends to social engineering which is manipulation of social identity to gain information. Next step is to gain access and maintain a backdoor for the same. Once you had access you can find any program that could let you maintain that access to the target machine.

Have you ever thought about how the magician pulls out a pigeon out of the hat? Surely it’s not magic. It’s the illusion that the magician had practiced a thousand times and the same applies to hacking, the trick you see is just an after effect of everything the hacker has created.

Some real tips and tricks: How to gain physical access, just create a live CD of any operating system and switch the target machine on, insert CD that contains live OS and press F10 or del to enter boot menu, select DVD drive to let target machine use your operating system instead of what it already have. You have gained unauthorized access to hard drives which contains every data your target machine has, now to create a backdoor either get SAM file (security access manager) of preinstalled OS of target machine which contains password in form of hashes, decrypt those hashes using any utility tool. So without any backlog, you have accessed a system. Deleting or black-marketing crucial information is a tag of cracking.

Now where cracking comes into the scenario is that hacking is challenging the utility of mechanisms which are used to secure a communication network while cracking is a malicious act of breaking into the system or over the network without permission with a motive of destruction. Both have different objectives. Contrary to the widespread myths, cracking does not usually involve some mysterious leap of hacker’s brilliance, but rather a persistence and dogged repetition of a handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the security of the target system.

Talking about Google, fairly everyone knows it’s the most widely used search engine, what about “HACKING GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE”? Don’t be too eager, the technical term is referred as Google DORKS, i.e. filtering and getting most refined search in one go by prefixing in title: in url: in text: file type: before searched keyword and putting them into “ “(quotes). Using quotes the Google will treat your searched keywords as a single string and give you better results. Try this trick and definitely, you will save your time.

By: Amal George , BCA 2nd Year, 1st shift

“Hacking and Cracking” are different things BUT people do use these words together because they are both malicious forms of cyber activity or it may be that they end up with a similar sound.

Well if you take a look, Hacking is stealing personal data (Password, Account number, etc.) or private data (company contract, company details, etc.) without the owner’s permission or knowledge, or any act that can breaches your security or privacy zone without your knowledge of what’s going in your system/life.

Whereas, cracking is when the programmer creates or builds a source code for the sole purpose of making the computer think that a particular process has occurred. For example, let’s take keygen (key generator which generates key or licences for some paid software and so on), a key generator and a patch for any application would trick the software into thinking that the key entered is correct, and not let it verify the key with the application server.

In simple words, cracking is when a person looks for the back door or a loophole in a program or an application to get inside the main source code and exploit it for the malicious purpose. Both hacking and cracking are malicious activities used to destroy or copy another person’s identity or information.

Government and companies do hire them for staying ahead of their rivals. Like in the case of government, they hire people who are well trained in hacking and they are well paid, for hacking into different countries’ servers to gather all kind of information mainly based on their economy, their defence and their current status, all of which could threaten or weaken the rivals. In the case of companies, they hire hackers for sneaking into the rival companies’ servers and steal all of their data like the shares, company deals and future ideas. Rival company knowing about these things means they can survive for long.

One of the recent initiatives from the Indian government is making India digital which is one step forward in development of the country. Digital India means making every single thing visible for the citizens like online payment of water bill, electricity bill, housing bill, govt policies and so on. If security is vulnerable, hackers are ready to get into your system and do all sort of malicious activities which can cause high level of distress. To overcome this kind of scenario, the government of India are hiring a good number of I.T professionals for the security purposes, they are also given additional training sessions, workshop lectures to make them stay updated.

 Nowadays certain hacking and cracking tools are also available, some of them are:

·         Nmap (Network Mapper)
Nmap is an abbreviation of 'Network Mapper', and it's a very well-known free open source hackers tool. Nmap is mainly used for network discovery and security auditing.

·         Metasploit Penetration Testing Software
Widely used by cyber security professionals and ethical hackers, this is a tool that you have to learn.

·         THC Hydra
This is a hugely popular password cracker and has a very active and experienced development team.

·         John the Ripper
john the Ripper (often you'll see abbreviated as 'JTR') wins the award for having the coolest name. John the Ripper, mostly just referred to simply as 'John' is a popular password cracking tool.

·         Wireshark
Wireshark essentially captures data packets in a network in real time and then displays the data in the human-readable format (verbose).

“HACKING AND CRACKING CAN BE CATEGORISED AS GOOD OR MALICIOUS. IT DEPENDS ON INTENSIONS OF WHO IS PERFORMING IT.”

ARTICLE BY- Abhishek Pandey  BCA-IVth sem, 1st shift

Hacker is a person who tries to gain access to someone’s computer or network by exploiting the vulnerabilities present inside that system. Intentions of hacker may vary, some people hack to gain valuable information which they can sell to earn a profit, some hackers hack to find the vulnerability of the system and fix them while some people hack to show their skills and some do it for fun.

Black v/s white

A black hat hacker is hacker who breaches security for malicious intents such as stealing the data or modifying the data in such that it becomes unusable, while a white hat hacker also known as ethical hacker, violate the security by detecting loopholes in the information system and help an organization to patch their system and make the network difficult to attack in the future.There also exist a category of hackers that are in the middle of black and white and they are known as grey hat hackers who sometimes becomes white hat hacker and sometimes become black hat according to their need.

Need for ethical hacking

According to a research, approximately 6.4 billion devices will connect to the internet in the year 2016 and not the only number of connected devices are growing day by day, the cyber-crime rate is also increasing so security of data is a big issue that’s why government and various organization are spending millions to minimize the risk. In order to harden the system various IT professionals are hired to identify vulnerabilities and fix them before a black hat come to exploit them.

Hack your Education!!

Cyber-crime is not increasing day by day but the intensity of the committed crime is also huge. It can be clearly understood by a massive attack that occurred in 2013, in that attack around 100 banks were targeted and loss of $900 billion was there. To prevent such kind of activities, cyber and network security as a subject is introduced in various schools and university to spread awareness and not only as a subject various institutes are now offering certification courses for the people who are interested in becoming the ethical hacker. Various big companies like Google, Microsoft and many more has launched their bug bounty hunting program. These efforts have encouraged many people from noobs to professionals in the field of hacking.

 Hackers are considered as masters in various fields in computers. They can write programs in multiple programming languages including C, C++, python, Perl, JavaScript. They also have a strong grip on databases and if they are specialized in malware analysis then knowledge of assembly language is required for disassembling the binaries and different types of malware. They also have extensive knowledge of the different networking protocols and cryptography techniques and they can easily work on different types of operating system like Windows, Macintosh and UNIX etc. Not only IT skills they have a great creative mind, they are an excellent communicator and some are also the great lock pickers.

A career prospect

According to NASSCOM, India requires around 77000 ethical hackers in the year but now it is current about 15000. In India average salary of an ethical hacker is 4.06 lakh per annum and after some experience of 4-5 years, the amount gets tripled or quadruple but only depend on the ability of a person. An entry level hacker can easily get 2.5 lakh per annum. Ethical hacking has a lot of growth scope since the security of data is a big concern and advancement of technology, an increase in a number of connected devices will surely rise the demand of ethical hackers in the future.